Category: POST

Once again, Flanders Scientific will be participating at Broadcast Asia together with The Media Village. This year’s product lineup focusses on 4k and HDR monitoring and mastering, featuring 3 monitors in the top-end XM series – the XM310K, XM311K and XM551U.

Also featured is the DM240, the best selling FSI monitor in our region, present in many HD editing and color grading suites throughout Southeast Asia.

Come visit us at Broadcast Asia 2019 from 18 to 20 June 2019 at Suntec City Convention Centre Hall 6, #6E4-01

XM310 – 31″ 4K Mastering Monitor

The XM310K is a 31″ true 4K resolution HDR and SDR reference master monitor equipped with professional 12Gbps SDI inputs. The XM310K qualifies as a Dolby Vision mastering monitor.

A peak luminance of 3000cd/m2, support for both PQ and HLG EOTFs, multiple color gamut selections, and a contrast ratio in excess of 1,000,000:1 make the XM310K ideal for a wide variety of demanding HDR workflows.

Many professional HDR displays have a peak luminance of just 1000nits. With a peak luminance of 3000nits, the XM310K is three times brighter making it one of the brightest commercially available professional HDR monitors.

XM311K – 31″ 4K Mastering Monitor

The XM311K is a 31″ true 4K resolution HDR and SDR reference master monitor equipped with professional 12Gbps SDI inputs. The XM311K qualifies as a Dolby Vision mastering monitor.

A fullscreen peak luminance of 1,000cd/m2, support for both PQ and HLG EOTFs, multiple color gamut selections, and a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 make the XM311K ideal for a wide variety of demanding HDR workflows.

XM551U – 55″ UHD OLEDXM551U

The XM551U is a professional reference monitor designed for color critical monitoring of 4K, UHD, and HD signals. It features the latest large format OLED panel technology offering outstanding black levels and overall picture performance. The XM551U is well equipped for SDR content mastering as well as PQ and HLG HDR monitoring.

DM240 – HD Mastering

The award-winning DM240 is our best-selling model and is found in colour grading suites all across Southeast Asia. It is a durable, lightweight, efficient, and color critical professional broadcast monitor. Industry leading fast mode processing, a durable all metal chassis, and our most advanced feature set make the DM240 ideal for applications ranging from production to post.

The toolset integrates elegantly to add a layer of control and automation, to assist with managing a broad range of administrative and organisational tasks. Modular in design, HelmutFX is able to communicate with all connected systems (ingest, archive, backup, MAM, PAM, etc.), enhancing workflows and removing complexity, providing editors with more freedom to focus on creative production. This provides EditShare customers with the option to enhance and expand their workflow even more, which is at the core of the company philosophy HelmutFX is available for purchase at: editshare.com/products/helmut-fx.

VBox – ‘Channel-in-a-Box’ Playout Automation

EditShare’s VBox is a turnkey, compact playout solution designed to meet the needs and demands of modern broadcast centres, satellite operators and telcos. VBox is a next generation ‘Channel-in-a-Box’ playout automation system that provides complete peace of mind to channel operators battling with the myriad IP playout codecs and HD and UHD formats. It’s a 4K video playout solution with built-in on-air graphics, a full remote playlist and transfer management in one easy to use, cost-effective compact server solution.

VBox is approved to work with EditShare’s smart workflow tools such as QScan AQC and Flow MAM, as well as EFS storage nodes for mission-critical playout. With VBox, EditShare offers an entire end-to-end solution from ingest to automation, making it a versatile, purpose-built playout platform with the flexibility to meet the needs of every TV station. For more information, visit editshare.com/products/vbox.

EditShare EFS – Storage Designed for the Future of Media & Entertainment

EditShare’s fluid media ecosystem facilitates sharing of content and ideas through organized access of media on an open platform that integrates all industry standard video and audio editing systems, color grading solutions and visual effects applications. Its flagship enterprise EditShare EFS scale out storage solution is developed for large-scale media organizations, supporting hundreds of users simultaneously with embedded tools for sharing media and collaborating across departments, across sites, and around the world.

In addition to showcasing EditShare’s multi-award-winning EFS storage platforms, attendees can also see EditShare’s latest advancements to its EFS Auditing technology, the industry’s only real-time auditing platform designed to manage, monitor and secure your media from inception to delivery. EFS Auditing keeps track of all digital assets and captures every digital footprint that a file takes throughout its life cycle, including copying, modifying and deleting of any content within a project.

Driving home the innovative power behind EditShare’s EFS Auditing solution, the proprietary technology just received the prestigious 2019 NAB Show Product of the Year Award in the Storage category for being the first real time purpose-built shared storage file auditing solution for the Media and Entertainment industry. IABM, the International Association for Broadcast & Media Technology Suppliers, recognized EFS Auditing as a game changer in storage content security at IBC 2018 with the “Best Storage” product award.

Flow 2019 – Innovating Remote Editing Workflows

EditShare will be showcasing the recently announced Flow 2019 extension 3. The latest update to its software-defined media asset management (MAM) solution simplifies media sharing and collaboration with embedded production tools to track, search, retrieve, edit, and automate media and media processes across on-premise and cloud-based storage solutions.

Flow 2019 Extension 3 also expands editing functionality to include the Emmy award-winning multicam technology developed for Lightworks.

In addition to major performance improvements across the board, Flow 2019 extension 3 adds support for new storage vendors while expanding its cloud-based support for Azure, Google, S3, Wasabi, and Backblaze with cost-effective scale up and scale down workflows. Flow 2019 extension 3 offers a flexible way to sync multiple cameras and footage together, including separate video and audio clips into one combined asset that can have tracks individually altered to change sync where needed. The asset can then be logged, shared and edited all within the Flow Story client allowing for simple and even shared editing between multiple Flow Story clients at the same time.

With support for MOS protocol in Flow 2019 Extension 3, journalists can create placeholders, craft stories and send for approval and distribution without having to jump from one application to another. Based on assignments from the NRCS, news clips are automatically created in Flow 2019 as sequence placeholders with news content edited in the Flow Story module and pushed to the NRCS when final. Flow 2019 automatically alerts the NRCS that the news clip is ready for distribution.

EditShare Flow 2019 is available today in three packages: Basic, Advanced and Enterprise. Volume pricing is also available. Users can test-drive Flow by downloading a free 14-day trial at my.editshare.com. For more information, visit flow.editshare.com.

QScan – IMF-Ready and Support for Dolby Vision HDR Compliance Testing

QScan’s wide-ranging model offering allows users to incorporate automated quality control processes into facilities and workflows of all sizes and demands; additionally, its new IMF capabilities opens doors to global business opportunities. With more content than ever being distributed in multiple languages over multiple platforms, QScan supports IMF workflows, allowing users to create one bundle with the variation in language and distribution encapsulated.

EditShare QScan models now also sport a new node-based IMF dashboard that gives users a visual “top-down” look at their IMF packages, demystifying the complexity of reading IMF bundle compositions for media professionals.

EditShare is also now providing Dolby Vision certified mastering post-production facilities new HDR compliance verification capabilities with its QScan product line. Unique to QScan, all vital information is displayed along a timeline with thumbnails. This visual breakdown of the data makes it simple for users to identify where problems within the content may appear and thus resolve any compliance delivery issues with greater efficiency and earlier in the production/post-production.

Over the last week or so, Blackmagic Design has been releasing a number of free online training videos that cover the various aspects of the software. In case you missed it, here they are, organised according to function.

Hours of fun awaits! We will be updating this page as more content is released, so stay tuned!

The XM310K is the brightest commercially available professional HDR monitor in the world with an astonishing peak luminance in excess of 3,000cd/m2. Flanders Scientific started accepting orders for the XM310K a few weeks ago and is happy to announce that the first deliveries are happening this week.

Mixing Light Interview

We sat down with Robbie Carman of Mixing Light to discuss HDR Mastering, the XM310K, and the challenges of grading at high nit values.

More facilities are looking beyond just the traditional needs of shared storage and collaborative workflows, as the amount of data they have to manage increases and workflows become more demanding.

As the EditShare reseller for Singapore and the Philippines, our recent installations certainly reflect this trend. Here are some examples of the challenges that our customers face and how integrating EditShare’s solutions helped overcome them.

Managing Production Assets

Shoot ratios have increased. According to some of our clients, a 10 minute final delivery could generate 2 to 4 hours of rushes. The discipline associated with shooting on film or tape seems a thing of the past, as file-based acquisition liberates the shooter from any physical limitations that film or tape might offer.

With a host of affordable 4K cameras now available on the market, high-resolution acquisition is on the rise. This is leading to a marked increase in storage requirements and an increased demand on CPU and GPU performance on the editing workstation. Some facilities choose to transcode to a mezzanine format, in order to lessen the strain on the editing workstation, generating more media and introducing more versions in which to manage.

These then brings about the need to better manage the volume and the various versions of production assets.

EditShare storage users are taking advantage of Flow, the production asset management software service that comes with every EditShare storage server. This allows them to search, browse, view metadata, log, create sub-clips and add markers. These additional tools allow for better organization of their media assets and for a truly collaborative workflow.

Beach House Pictures, for example, who own a 3-node XStream EFS 450 384TB system (above), use Flow extensively in their production workflow. The tools in Flow are particularly useful in the documentary and tv series work, from the ingest phase through organising the media for the various post production process to the generating the final masters.

Singapore Press Holdings (Wanbao) also use Flow as a means for writers and editors to quickly locate the media that they need. They also have a long term objective in mind, which is to catalog their content for quick and easy retrieval in the future.

Remote Access

Moving Bits, based in Singapore are one of the early adopters of Editshare here, recently upgraded to the XStream EFS200 model. They were using their system without the Flow management tools for several years. Given the nature of the work that they did, they did not feel that production asset management tools would significantly increase their efficiency.

They then came along a project last year where the customer, located outside of Singapore, wanted the ability to review rushes as the project was being shot. Shoots were happening in various locations around in the Southeast Asian region, with the rushes being sent back to Singapore for editing.

They decided that the easiest way to accommodate the clients request was to use Airflow, a browser-based client. Turning on proxy-creation for this project in Flow ensured that any ingested media had a low-res and streamable mp4 version automatically generated.

These proxy files were made assessable to the overseas client, so that they were able to review clips moments after they were introduced to the Editshare storage. Essentially, Moving Bits created their own private cloud. And all this process was done without the need of any additional work on the part of the Moving Bits staff.

Archiving projects and media

When we visit facilities that have been in business for more than 5 years or so, we often see data ‘archives’ in the form of spinning hard drives. In some facilities, we see more than 200 hard drives dedicated to archiving projects and their associated media. An Excel or Google sheet usually accompanies this library of hard drives, acting as a means to link media to drive.

Many of these archives grow organically. As the production company grows and takes on more and more projects, the natural tendency is to use the same hard drives that were used to store the rushes as a means to archive the project and media, with a little house-keeping and organisation before tucking it away on a shelf.

Over time, shelves full of hard drives emerge and several challenges begin to surface. One of the common and often frustrating challenge that facilities face happens when you try to find something. An excel or google sheet only helps to some degree and is reliant on the accuracy of the data that is input. Surprisingly, many facilities rely on memory when it comes to the details contained in their archive, which is a problem when a key member of the staff or management leaves.

Looks familiar? Many facilities end up with shelves full of hard drives as their archives.

We hear stories of editors spending hours, sometimes days, plugging hard drives in and out of his workstation, one after another, browsing through folder after folder, looking for the clips that are needed.

And that is if the hard disk works at all. The moving parts of a hard drive don’t like to stay immobile on a shelf and we often hear of drives that fail to work when needed. An expensive trip to a data recovery centre often follows if the content is deemed to be of value.

The facility owner begins to ask himself if there’s a better and more cost effective way to this. What seemed to be a simple and cost effective way to store away projects and rushes often turns out being unreliable, with costs that keep growing.

How does EditShare help solve this? By offering Ark Tape, a 24-slot or 48-slot, LTO 7 tape library solution. LTO technology have long been used in banks, data centres etc. and is a proven technology for long-term, safe and reliable archive of data. Each LTO 7 tape holds 6TB of data and costs in the region of US$100, making it the ideal archive medium for the media and entertainment industry, which consumes large amounts of data.

What really sweetens the deal is the combination of Flow and Ark within the Editshare eco-system. When used together, it creates an environment where content is managed from the time it is ingested, through the post production process and onto the archive phase. All throughout, users can browse proxies of the content, whether the original high-res media resides on the Editshare server, in the tape library or is off the tape library and tucked away on a shelf. Flow always know where the content is.

2 recent clients chose Flow and Ark, for slightly different reasons:

Hoods Inc., who have been in the TV content creation business for more than 10 years, found that it was just taking too much time and resources to retrieve archived content, without putting a proper media asset management in place.

August Pictures is another company that’s been in business for more than 10 years and have amassed a huge library of content during this time. It aims to properly catalog their large library of projects and media.

Better Workflows

Facilities are always looking for ways to increase the productivity and reliability of their production and post production processes and workflow. Editshare offers a number of products and features to help achieve this.

Automated workflows

There are some processes in a typical production or post production workflow that are tedious, repetitive or prone to errors. Editshare offers Flow Automation, an additional layer of intelligence to Flow . Repetitive tasks like copying, moving, deleting, transcoding and organizing projects or media spaces can be triggered at regular times of day or week or based on user actions.

It’s easy for the average user to design workflows as well, through an easy-to-use node-based interface.

Automated Quality Control

In modern media workflows, the earlier any issues are found, the easier and faster it is to rectify them. To achieve this, Editshare also offers QScan, a family of fully-featured Automatic Quality Control (AQC) systems, engineered to check the integrity of media files at user-definable points in a production workflow. Failure to check could result in major headaches further down the line. For this reason, Quality Control is often carried out at the start and then at the end of a workflow, either as a manual or an automatically scheduled operation.

Qscan is also available as a stand-alone product and not restricted to the Editshare server environment.

File Auditing

Editshare’s File Auditing feature essentially tracks every operation made on any piece of content that resides on the Editshare eco-system, by any user on the network, over time. So if someone moves or deletes the file, whether it’s done accidentally or maliciously, the system tracks it and is able to tell who moved it and when. Enforcing this level of accountability makes for a more secure environment.

To conclude

Editshare is a great partner for any facility to have, with their software tools and features that go way beyond just shared storage, helping a facility to better manage the ever increasing amount of content that it handles.

For more information on Editshare’s product
or to arrange for a demonstrationplease fill out the form below:

Colorfront is a developer of award-winning on-set dailies and transcoding systems which are utilized by small, medium and large companies alike, to process and deliver media for Hollywood blockbusters, high-end episodic TV and OTT internet entertainment.

It will be making it’s debut appearance at Broadcast Asia 2018 with The Media Village, its reseller for the Southeast Asian region. On show at BCA2018, booth #6H4-04, is their flagship product, Transkoder. Read More

VHQ POST (S) PTE LTD in Singapore, a leading content house devoted to the art of storytelling, announced that they are making a significant investment in professional grade UHD monitoring by purchasing seven XM650U monitors.

Once again, The Media Village is pleased to have Flanders Scientific at our booth at Broadcast Asia 2018 with an exciting lineup of monitors catering to a range of requirements, from HD to 4k, including a range of solutions for HDR preview, monitoring and mastering. On the floor show at Broadcast Asia:

XM310K – 31″ 4K Mastering Monitor

XM650U – 65″ UHD OLED

DM240 – 24″ 10-bit LCD

DM250 – 24.5” 10-bit OLED

Bram Desmet, CEO of Flanders Scientific will be at the booth throughout the show to answer any questions you have on their displays or on how HDR will

Bram will also speak at the Innovation Hub, on Level 6 of Suntec Singapore from 12:20pm – 12:40pm on Thursday, 28 June 2018. He will be presenting on the topic of “HDR, Wide Color Gamut and UHD / 4K Monitoring Past, Present and Future”.